Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
A Geek Culture Podcast - Two life-long Geeks explain, critique and poke fun at the major pillars of Geek Culture for your listening pleasure.
Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
Encore: Origins of Horror Tropes
Horror doesn’t hand down commandments from a mountaintop; it scavenges from headlines, folklore, and fear, then welds those scraps into images we can’t shake. We open the vault on a Halloween favorite to map where the genre’s “rules” actually come from—Lover’s Lane, masks without faces, babysitters on the edge, clowns that cross lines, and formless things that fall from the sky. The trail starts with the Texarkana Moonlight Murders and the media-born “Phantom Killer,” threads through the brutal, under-told case of Janet Christman and the babysitter myth it spawned, and crystallizes in Halloween’s The Shape: a mask that erases humanity so audiences can bear the unbearable. From there, we unpack how Ed Gein’s grotesque artifacts overwhelmed facts to seed Psycho, Texas Chainsaw, and Silence of the Lambs, proving horror borrows objects and builds archetypes. And that's just scratching the surface.
Hey there, War Rockets. We thought we'd open up the vault for one of our very first Halloween installments, The Origin of Horror Tropes. This is back when we were weep ups, a little more raw and a little less organized. October 31st, Halloween itself of 2021. So without further ado, Horigons. Enjoy.
SPEAKER_01:Trigger warning. The following podcast contains material that some may find disturbing and are not suitable for all audiences. Instances of violence, sexual assault, murder, and further loss of life are discussed. Yeah, it's like there's only seven stories you can tell, and one of them is probably this is Dispatch Ajax. I'm your host, Jake, and this is my co-host.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I yeah, Skip.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he he meant to talk, but he didn't.
SPEAKER_00:So I I was asleep. The Dulcet Tones. Jake Nelson lulled me into slumber.
SPEAKER_01:It's ASMR Dispatch Ajax. Let's have let's have a sleepy little podcast today. Just you and me.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's interesting that you categorize yourself as a fellow listener since you're the host of the show.
SPEAKER_01:We're all listeners, aren't we, folks? Just happy little listeners, just walk around doing the dishes, listening to sleepy little podcasts, huh? Feels good, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_03:It's the Bob Ross podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Now we're gonna do a little bit here. Just put a happy little bit in there. Oh, it's gonna be f full of laughs. I thought it would be fun to Can we actually record a different one? Because that's that's weird. That was a weird thing I did. There's this boy named Skip. I met him 15 years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding. Even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child with this blind, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes. The devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up before I realized what was living behind those boys' eyes was purely and simply evil.
SPEAKER_00:It's incredible too, because I mean we met in college, so uh the fact that I was a six-year-old and I always thought it was like a Doogie Hauser kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03:Um Yeah, right. Which is also a horror.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, you know, if if if Doogie like held a knife to somebody's throat, like Chucky, and made him like get accepted to college.
SPEAKER_03:Speaking of Chucky, did you know that Chucky's slightly based off a real story? I thought it was just based on that Twilight Zone episode.
SPEAKER_00:No, it's there's uh Telly Savalas.
SPEAKER_01:Who loves your baby?
SPEAKER_00:Right?
SPEAKER_01:No, that's No, I I know it's it's a great Twilight Zone episode. Uh episode. Uh, what was that dolly's name?
SPEAKER_00:Jesus, the doll's not the villain.
SPEAKER_01:Little Polly Shore?
SPEAKER_03:The dolly. Little Polly Shore. It's little Polly Shore. The wheels is gonna kill ya.
SPEAKER_00:Child's play is so brain dead. The doll's just protecting the little girl from the abusive father.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yeah. Apparently, this is uh there was a doll in the early 1900s that was supposedly haunted, and all the people who received the doll uh would wind up with grisly deaths, and then they they stopped, they took it away, and it's been locked up ever since.
SPEAKER_03:Took it to doll jail.
SPEAKER_02:That doll is what we called in the prison system a bitch.
SPEAKER_00:So Roger Ebert wrote this too, right?
SPEAKER_02:One day in a fit of rage, he cut out the bitch's eyes.
SPEAKER_03:Like a doll's eyes. Ah, the great circle of doll horror life. Jaws to Halloween to Twilight Zone to Chucky.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so I married an axe murderer thrown in there.
SPEAKER_00:Hmm, that's right. Yep. Yep. This is the cycle of life.
SPEAKER_01:Where's Salt and John when you need him?
SPEAKER_00:You know, I say that constantly. Well, so it occurred to me that uh, you know, and not by me, I mean uh everyone who's ever seen a horror movie, that they all share similar tropes. A lot of tropes are era-specific. Um, you know, you had the 50s aerotropes and the 70s aerotropes and the 80s and 90s aerotropes, which are all vastly different from each other, but a lot of them share common ancestry. So we thought we'd uh break down this is Jake, by the way. Wait, uh you didn't ever No, you're you're Skip. You're Skip talking. I'm Jake. You said my name, though. Yeah, but you're evil. That's why you need to know. I mean, you have to have a protagonist and an antagonist, right? Yeah, that's uh that's I'm Skip, and this is the shape. I'm the final girl in this episode. So we're gonna explore some of the uh origins, some of these tropes, because slashers obviously were a thing long before Halloween, but Halloween kind of like perfected the model, I guess you could say.
SPEAKER_01:Well, there's I think taking some of those elements from other films and cementing them to then that everything is built off of since. Kind of connecting the dots in a lot of ways. Taking stuff, you know, that you saw in giallo horror films of the of Italy in the in the 60s, and then you know, your peeping tom and your psycho and stuff from like Black Christmas or Texas Chainsaw, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, and then kind of solidifying them, and that it became much more palatable and marketable.
SPEAKER_00:If you're a certain age, especially, you kind of intuitively get it. The crazy thing, I think, with a lot of these horror tropes that span a diverse number and type of film actually come from not only real events, but a very limited number of real events. And their staying power and their like I think sometimes it's coincidental because it plays on fears that we have as a society, and sometimes it's it comes from the fact that these were real events, whether you realize it or not. Because it's sort of in like the collective unconscious, the zeitgeist of the of society. Specifically, we discussed the film The Town of Dreaded Sundown, which is a slasher film, technically, but it's based on a true story. The Texar Canon and Moonlight Murder, which were real, and kind of created the slasher character that we know, like Michael Myers or Jason. It was based on an actual serial killing spree in the late 1940s, where a killer wore a mask, had sort of like a persona that was created by the media, and killed people in really, really brutal ways that were kind of copied later by people like Son of Sam, Ted Bundy to a certain extent. So the perpetrator of the Moonlight Murders was a man known as the Phantom Killer. And he attacked at least eight people within ten weeks, and he killed five of them. The first two victims he attacked got away. Now the interesting thing about this to me is we all know the trope of it's the people that transgress whatever moral institutions we have are usually the ones that die, right? So if you have sex in a movie, you die. If you're out too late, you die. Alcohol or drug use? Sure. Usually that means you're doomed. If you're making uh fake passports? Yeah, fake vaccine passports. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, could we do a slasher film where we're just killing anti-vaxxers?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, totally. There was this weird switchover beforehand. And there are too many horror tropes for us to go into completely in this episode, but some of the main ones we're sticking with are. If you if you look back, you think about a movie like um The Blob, for instance. Yes. Which is a you know, popcorn, big group, big horrible popcorn flag. I mean not horrible, the horrifying popcorn flag.
SPEAKER_03:It was atrocious. It's actually a great movie.
SPEAKER_00:Well, this well, then you have the sequ the remake, boy. Um it's one of the first times that you actually have teenagers as the main characters. Because before that you had like sci-fi horror monster movies and things like that, and then usually the adults, a scientist, or you'd look at something like uh the the thing from another world, you know, them Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Day of the Triffids. Yeah, it's all adults and scientists, usually, right? Because they're the only ones who explain what's going on. But the blob is one of the first times that you actually see teenagers as like the main protagonists. They're the only ones who know what's going on. And it's the adults who won't listen to them. Because that's essentially about the time when teenagers became a thing. Yeah. Before a certain era, you were a kid or you were an adult. That's it. There's no in between. And then when teenagers became a demographic, and especially after World War II, when they became a demographic that had money to spend, and started actually pushing pop culture, like music and fashion, basically spending money and creating the cultural zeitgeist, that's when you see a shift. Oh, the the 50s teenager stuff, like the uh you know, rebel without a cause era, like, you know, we're teens and we're whatever, screw society. And then, you know, that of course becoming like part of a moral panic that causes the movies to reflect why they should be punished for the things that they do. That ironic Cold War thing where it was screw communism, like, oh, that's all about fitting in and conformity. Uh, but then like everything that America did was about fitting in and conformity and brainwashing and the entire decade of the 50s.
SPEAKER_01:Everyone could be an individual, and as far as Leave to Beaver would allow it.
SPEAKER_00:Right, yeah, exactly I mean look at those hygiene films and like the film reels about etiquette. That's some straight up brainwashing, the kind of thing that they would accuse the Soviet Union of doing. So then you have you have teenagers, for the first time being like not just side characters or reactionary characters, but actually the main characters, starting around the blob, which is in 58. Then, and even those sci-fi horror monster movies before that, you always had kids making out in a car, left vulnerable to attack from this whatever monster that came out of the woods, or whatever. That was a trope that was used quite often, and it's still parodied today to whatever degree. But that wasn't really a contemporary narrative then. But that trope appeared in films, but the reason it stuck in horror movies was because of an actual case of serial murder in the Moonlight Murders. Because most of the Phantom Killer's kills took place in people's cars, Lover's Lane type murders, where two teenagers or young people in general and their companions parked to make out or whatever, and of course, then are attacked. In the case of the first two victims, they were not killed, they actually live. But that's what sets the stage for that. And of course, then people kind of run with that and turn it into a moral panic sticking point, which America always does for some idiot reason, like with sex or drugs or whatever they think Satanism actually is. Because it's not really a thing. There really are no Satanists, they're just kind of libertarians.
SPEAKER_03:Well, hmm.
SPEAKER_00:There are Satanists. There are no actual Yeah, but not like really that really believe the Narc War whatever.
SPEAKER_01:I'm sure there are some that see it as more than just a figurehead of their cultural idealism. The like the Satanists who are like kidnapping kids and like, you know, the reason for satanic panic in the 70s, that's that's not a thing.
SPEAKER_00:In the 80s, yeah. No, it never happened. Other than the current Democratic Party, obviously, you know. Oh, of course. Obviously, uh no, because I've read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so obviously I know it's true. Basically, between February 22nd, 1946, and May 3rd, 1946, there was a series of attacks by the Phantom Killer. First two victims, Jimmy Hollis and Mary Larry, lived.
SPEAKER_01:Alright, I just have Mary Larry.
SPEAKER_00:M-A-R-Y, L-A-R-E-Y.
SPEAKER_01:Who would do that to a child?
SPEAKER_00:I know! It's terrible. Mary Larry. I always said if we had a kid, we could never name it with a vowel that sounded like Y. Because like my mom, her name was Terry. She was Teresa. And so she started going by TJ when she married my father because it'd be Terry Harvey. And that sounds awful. It's not good.
SPEAKER_01:But the the true rhyming of a of a name, that's you just can't do that. You can't do that.
SPEAKER_00:You don't do like Jake Lake, you know, or or Barry Harry. Actually, that sounds kind of cool. Jake Lake kind of sounds cool. Uh like a hard-boiled detective.
SPEAKER_02:Uh Jake Lake took you to the lake and uh he he had his way with you.
SPEAKER_00:Well, see, if you're like hanging out with a dude named Jake Lake, do not go to the lake with him. That's what I'm saying. Either he's really, really lame, he's obsessed with the lake because that's his name, or he's going to kill you. I mean, there's no two way, there's no two ways about it.
SPEAKER_01:But I mean he's he's very attractive. So maybe it's worth it either way.
SPEAKER_03:Projecting much. Um he's also the star of the football team, and he gets really good grades. He's really hunky, and everyone likes he's got a lot of friends. His pants are really tight and it's nice.
SPEAKER_00:We're getting into different territory with that. So uh those two survived, and their their account is horrible. It's a it's a really harrowing tale. It's really awful. It involves sexual assault and attempted murder. Um, if I remember right, Jimmy Hollis suffered multiple skull fractures and was hospitalized for weeks. The first actual double murder was Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore four weeks later. Then there was a series of successive ones, but most of them were either in a car or they were a couple of them were in their houses, and when he started escalating. But this is where you start to see a lot of these tropes take shape. So a lot of the whole like moral panic stuff about teenagers or young people in cars, like possibly doing something unsavory, being killed as a result, starts to take shape because of these events. And then other tropes, based on how these murders escalated, started to form. One of the double murders, or at least attempted murders, from Moonlight Murders, happened on uh Friday, May 3, 1946, shortly before 9 p.m. Virgil Starks, a blue-collar dude, who had a uh 500 acre farm in Texarkana, sat after work, listening to the radio. While his wife is in her bedroom, lying on the bed in her nightgown, she heard something in the backyard and asked Virgil to turn down the radio. Seconds later, while Virgil was reading the newspaper, two shots were fired into the back of his head from a closed double window three feet away. So he stalked them outside their window, saw their routine, and planned a murder accordingly. Katie didn't hear the gunshots, but she did hear the sound of breaking glass, because it would have been broke plate glass back then. She thought that Virgil had dropped something, so she went to investigate. When she came into the doorway of the living room, she saw Virgil stand up and then suddenly slumped back into his chair. Yeah. She saw blood, ran to him and lifted up his head, and then realized he was already dead. The second shot killed him instantly. And they only had a hand crank phone, so she's trying to charge the phone so that she can call the police, and she only gets two cranks in before she shot twice in the face from the same wind. One bullet entered her right cheek and exited her left ear. The other went in just below her lip, broke her jaw, knocked out several teeth, and then lodged under her tongue. She managed to get to her feet, got a gun. Wow. Yeah, managed to run and find a gun, but couldn't defend herself because she had too much blood in her eyes. Which is rough. Yeah. So then she hears the screen on the back porch door being torn open by the killer. She assumed she was going to die. So she did her best to stagger to her bedroom to leave a note so that someone would know what happened. So the killer ran back into the to the back of the house and made his way up the stairs, into the side screen porch, and then through the back door. She heard him coming through the kitchen window, so she turned around and ran through the dining room, through the bedroom, down the hallway, into another bedroom, and then into the living room and out the front door. And we know all of this, not just from the story, but she left a trail of blood through the entire house, which was easy to follow. Yeah. Uh oh, in one account, it was referred to as a virtual river of blood and teeth. That's fun. So she was barefoot and still in her nightgown, she ran across the street to her sister and brother-in-law's house, but no one was home. So she ran fifty more yards to a neighbor's house. He finally entered the door. She said Virgil's dead, and then collapsed. The neighbor shot his rifle into the air to get everyone's attention, and then another neighbor went to get his car, and the whole family took Katie to the hospital, and then she was so delirious that and had been shot in the mouth. She felt guilty for for needing help and gave one of her gold teeth to her rescuers because in her delirium thought that that would be appropriate payment.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:We got a lot going on here. So, like, she had lost a lot of blood, but her heart rate apparently remained normal, and she was thankfully stabilized in the hospital and was and was questioned by the sheriff. Of course, the newspapers print a story. The headline was Murder Rock City Again, Farmer Slain, Wife Wounded. The sheriff came back and once again tried to get more information, and she discounted almost everything that was written in the article because it was just clickbait garbage. So apparently they had printed that her husband Virgil had heard a car outside their home several nights in a row, stalking them. Kind of like Michael does in Halloween with Lori. But apparently that wasn't true. You just see from this one instance that a lot of these tropes that you will see in movies again and again and again, kind of come from one actual event, an event that was so crazy that you could pull a dozen different tropes. What are the odds of all of this happening, right? You start putting these different tropes together during the moral panic of the conservative era in 1980s. Probably in the late 70s, into the 80s.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Young people making out in their car, stalked by some serial slasher, uh, you know, the attempted murder, the stalking with their house, and then the 80s galvanizes this. Well, this happened because they were doing something immoral. They were doing something that goes against social norms by having sex outside of marriage or whatever. You put these things together as what I think society thinks is cautionary tales about morality, but in fact had nothing to do with each other or anything else. One person created all these crazy circumstances.
SPEAKER_01:It's kind of a an auroboros of reality and fiction, you know, because you have that happen, which then leads to stories about it, which then leads to urban legends, which then bleeds into other people, you know, like uh Son of Sam doing a similar kind of thing, you know, or um Bundy. Um although Bundy didn't go up to people's cars and kill them, stalk people in their houses. He did it at Sorordi House in Florida. That version isn't necessarily what he's known for. Much more of a a smooth criminal, I think, is the idea of Ted Bundy rather than a slasher vibe.
SPEAKER_00:Which is funny, because like is in reality, but yeah, his archetype isn't that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean the the version like uh a son of Sam or uh a zodiac killer, those are seen, I think, differently than uh Ted Bundy is. Um but you kind of have those, and those lead to more things in pop culture, which then you know it's kind of the um the scream line. Don't blame the movies. Uh movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative.
SPEAKER_00:Great line. It's a fascinating thing.
SPEAKER_01:It is. That's why both the real cases and the fictional cases pull us into them, you know, the the salacious nature of the outline of sex, you know, being imprinted on them, the ability for anybody to be attacked by these driven maniacs. Everyone can put themselves into that situation, which is much different than a giant ant coming after you.
SPEAKER_00:When I was living in Oregon walking Starbuck one day, I actually saw a guy that had a truck with a vanity license plate that said Bundy. An Oregon license plate that says Bundy. Seems a little tone-deaf, doesn't it? I mean one would think. Because it's either Ted Bundy or it's that crazy separatist family. Oh yeah. Either way, that's not a good thing to have. In this vein that helped contribute to this trope, another actual event that inspired a lot of different stuff. I have a personal tie to this because I I've lived where this happened for 15 years. I know people that live on this street, and you'd be surprised at how many tropes come from the murder of Janet Crispin. Janet Christman was born in March 1936 in Boonville, Missouri, closer to the river where the University of Missouri is. Janet's parents owned Ernie's Cafe, where you have eaten with me, right next to the comic book store. Oh, the um the the diner, right? Yep. Fascinating. Yeah, so that's a weird one. Poor Janet was a babysitter. On the night of March 18th, 1950, there was a bad storm with heavy wind and rain and sleet. The temperatures had dropped to the mid-twenties, and not a lot of people were going out, but there was an eighth grade party that night. Janet didn't go because someone had called her family, asking for her to babysit a three-year-old, the son of Mr and Mrs. Ed Romack. She told everyone she needed the money to make the last payments on a suit that she had bought for Easter. And their home was on Stewart, which at that point was sort of like on the city limit line, but now it's basically right downtown. Not right downtown, but close to downtown. Ed Romack, who was leaving to go play cards at 7 50 PM, showed Janet the loaded shotgun that he kept by his front door and instructed her on how to use it if something ever happened. And basically it was just to answer the door with it. Greg, the three year old she was watching, slept with the radio turned on, so he would not have heard anything that was about to happen. Now, in the middle of the night, Officer Ray McCowan, who was on duty with the Columbia PD, answered a phone call, and the only words that came out in screaming panic were come quick. He tried to get more information, but the line was cut, and all he got was a dial tone. And he knew that it was a prank based on the terror in her voice. So he waited for the phone to ring again because he didn't have any way to trace where it came from or who it was. So all he could do was wait to hopefully call back. Soon after that, Thoromax called from the Moon Valley Villa, where she, her husband, and the Muellers were all playing cards, just to check on Janet and see how the night went, but nobody answered. But it was late, so they weren't worried about it, presuming that she had just fallen asleep. They stayed there for a few more hours, and about 135 AM they returned home, noticed that the porch light was still on, and the front window blinds were wide open, which was unusual and kind of goes against the instructions they had given her. Ed tried to unlock the door, but realized it was already unlocked. That's where they found thirteen year old Janet Chrisman on the floor of the living room in a pool of blood. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered. She had a head wound from a blunt instrument and multiple puncture wounds from a mechanical pencil, plus a cord from an electric iron that had been snipped with a pair of scissors around her neck as a garot, and a few feet away they could see the phone dangling off the hook. So Ed Romack called the police, and the police came out. So Janet Chrisman, she only weighed about 135 pounds, and police knew immediately that she had put up a real fight. They could find evidence of a struggle that went from the kitchen to the hallway and to the living room in front of the house. There were wounds on both sides of her head, including puncture marks that appeared to have been made by mechanical pencil, and her face appeared to have been scratched. And the sheriff's deputy who investigated the scene thought that things were a little convenient because it was strange that she'd been killed with an instrument that was hidden in the house. The iron where the cord was cut from wasn't in plain sight, and the gun was still by the front door. So they suspected whoever it was likely knew the house, knew the family, knew Janet Christman, and knew the routine that they used when they left the house. It seems that whoever killed her knew she would be there alone. Or knew that that child was going to be asleep with the radio on. And since she was instructed very specifically to only answer the door with the shotgun, which hadn't been touched, either she knew the person who had knocked on the front door, or that person didn't go to the front door and distracted her, and was somehow able to unlock the front door and get in without a struggle. Because the door was not broken, the lock wasn't broken, it was unlocked. But the shotgun was still there. Untouched. So the killer was familiar with the entire situation, which means it was somebody that the family most likely knew and knew intimately. Also disturbingly, there had been another similar murder in 1946. That was a bad year. Two blocks away from the Romac home, a girl named uh Mary Lou Jenkins was strangled with an extension cord. They didn't think that was similar?
SPEAKER_01:They didn't put those two and two together?
SPEAKER_00:Now, CPD, in all of their glorious wisdom that stands to this day, did charge a black janitor at the university who was uh mentally challenged, uh about 70. They coerced a confession from him, they prosecuted him, he recanted, they refused to retract it, and he was executed. So that's fun. What was his name? Uh Floyd Cochran. Floyd Cochrane. They blamed it on Floyd Cochrane. And he'd done both killings. And basically, there so there had been reports of PP Tom incidents, a string of rapes, all in that just couple block radius over that four-year span between 46 and 50. They blamed it all on Floyd Cochran. So everyone involved in the cold case now obviously it's reopened as a cold case. And you know, it has been for a long time because it was very obvious that that man committed no crime.
SPEAKER_01:It was piling on the tragedy.
SPEAKER_00:Even though they had blamed the whole thing on at least the prosecutor had blamed the whole thing on Floyd Cochran, the police had focused on another suspect, Robert Mueller. Weird. I'm surprised this hasn't come up in QAnon circles. This could be Mueller. I don't really know, but it's it's spelled the same as Robert Mueller. Mueller. Mueller. He was actually a family friend, and he had been into the house on multiple occasions. Um according to testimony that was introduced to a grand jury later on, uh Mrs. Romack said that she felt frightened and uncomfortable around Mueller and said he had run his hand across her dress two days before when they were alone. Basically top to feel. Right. And Ed Romack also testified that Mueller had once convinced him that he admired Crispin's quote well developed form.
SPEAKER_01:That's what all non creepy people say.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So also the night of her murder, he had called the Romac's house asking Janet to babysit for him. But they they told him Told him that she was babysitting at the Romax. So he knew where she would be, that she'd be alone, what house it was, and the layout of the house. Yeah. Yeah. And then he also testified in front of a grand jury that Muller at one point said to him, I might have done it and then forgot about it. What does that mean? Pretty fing damning to me. And yet they convicted and executed another man. On top of that, Muller carried a mechanical pencil that had a round end that generally matched the puncture wound on Chrisman's head. Come on. Yeah. Um but then there was a bunch of uh legal stuff. They had given him a lie detector test without alerting his attorney. So that was problematic. They didn't have an arrest warrant for him, but they still took him into custody and then took him to Jeff City to get the lie detector test, which that's also a problem. Uh, because he was under the impression he was under arrest. Um on May 24th, the grand jury did not return an indictment. Instead, they just criticized the police and the sheriff's departments for not working together. So uh the report said, quote, in the opinion of the grand jurors, much of the effort expended has been wasted and dissipated because of the failure to correlate the information available. So basically, they knew better and they still f ⁇ ed it up. It goes on to say that it blames, quote, petty jealousies and it fueled a quote almost complete lack of cooperation between various law enforcement agencies. So that's good. So immediately afterward, Mueller joined the Air Force and moved away. He tried to sue the uh sheriffs and police departments for violating his civil rights, but lost the case, and died a free man in 2006 at the age of 83. Yeah, it's a terrible story. It's a really, really, really, really horrible story. Yeah. And obviously nothing will ever come of it. They will never figure it out, I'm sure, since everyone involved is dead. But this this horrible and tragic event that's so brutal and gruesome, you can see where the horror tropes come from here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean that's that's a distinct starting point for the kind of the legend of the the babysitter you know being attacked, you know, oftentimes stalked and toyed with by the perpetrator, which you've seen in many things like Black Christmas or The Sitter, or distinctly When a Stranger Calls in 1979. Um that's when you get, you know, the have you have you checked on the children, the call is coming from inside the house. In inside the house, yeah. Which is a natural evolution of that. But you know, a lot of those things, it's often again some roving sociopath who's a tricker or to yeah, yeah, it's out to to kill for for killing sake, but unlike you know, most actual human tragedies, it's mostly people that they know. But it's a terrifying concept because it's it's usually a uh again, a babysitter tends to be, you know, someone a teenage or you know, in their young twenties, uh usually alone by themselves in a somewhat unfamiliar place. They are put in the possession and protective uh stance of even younger innocents. So it's it's an easy target for older, stronger people to attack and play with. And it's easy to put yourself in that spot because we've all, again, been in a similar situation.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, and of course, yeah, this inspired directly all of those troops, but also that's the basically the story of Lori Strode in Halloween. Yeah. She didn't go out, she was asked to babysit, she was being stalked by a guy who figured out the routine, where she was gonna be. Um I mean, it's just Lori, but Lori happened to live. That's the only real difference there. Um so I mean it's like the it's kind of the archetypal story in that sense. Like all almost all slashers, like in amalgamation with other tropes, come from this one story. And it's it's really sad. Um it happened. Uh, and I think that's one of the reasons it still rings true to people today. It still feeds into these primal fears because uh, you know, whether they consciously know that it was real or not, they could see how it could be. And and it's you get a character, a killer in a horror movie that's something like the shape Michael Myers, or he's like Jason for he's it's usually because they can't imagine real people doing this. And it has to be something sort of disembodied and like a force of nature that because how that's one reason why you you put the the mask on them.
SPEAKER_01:It takes away any humanity that they have.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Which is another interesting point because like the reason that the mask thing evolved was because of the phantom killer who wore a mask during these killings. And yet the reason it stuck was for that reason. There's a real human tendency to dehumanize a killer like that. Putting a mask on them is easier for them to deal with. It's scary, it's even more scary than a real person. But at the same time, they're so scared that it could be a real person that they have to detach like that. It comes from a real place. I mean, and and yeah. But that's that's a heavy one.
SPEAKER_01:But uh, real events lead to urban legends, which then lead to tropes from those because they they stick with you.
SPEAKER_00:Which brings me to another interesting one. Another one that inspired a huge swath of tropes. Um is of course the serial murder well, how do I even say serial murders? The crimes of Ed Ghee. That's a good way to put it. Right. Because there's a good chance he was not a serial killer, but everyone puts him on that shelf. He really wasn't, though.
SPEAKER_01:He's just kind of a creep. It's become kind of a ubiquitous term for these horrific human monsters. But whether these people actually never killed anyone, like a Charles Manson, you know, whether they killed someone all at once, you know, like a lot of people in a certain setting, those are mass murders, those don't count. But a lot of people are you just you just labeled those things because you're of such deviance and such atrocity.
SPEAKER_00:And then you have spree killers, which were very different. Completely different thing. Like it's the difference between like BTK and I don't know, like um Bonnie and Clyde, you know what I mean? Like, which are those are completely different tropes, but they're they're a thing, you know, and other people have done the same thing. Of course, Edgeen, a shockingly large number of horror tropes came from Edgein, who was not even a serial killer. He admitted to killing two women, but in actuality, he was a grave robber, a mama's boy, and uh insert joke there, I guess. Right, exactly. Uh he was Well, I mean, we can't we need to get into it.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, if we're talking about Ed.
SPEAKER_00:Necrophile, I think, kind of? Maybe? Was that more ritualistic that it was sexual? I I'm not really sure.
SPEAKER_01:Uh it's tough. Then you're getting into the psychology that's behind the what he's doing and why he's doing it. I I it's how how can you truly explain?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and so so the evidence of Gean's crimes were so much more horrific than the actual crimes he committed that I think people had a hard time believing he wasn't a serial killer. Or at least what what we would call later a serial killer. In 1957, hardware store owner, Bernice Warden, went missing. And the last person that was reported uh seen with her was Ed Gean. If I remember Ed, he was like a local handyman, just did odd jobs and and and gigs for money. So he was the main suspect, and he was arrested. And when authorities searched his house, they not only found Bernice Warden decapitated, but a smorgasbord of human remains, manipulated and adorned ritualistically, including skulls as bedposts, trash cans, and chair cushions made of human flesh, nine preserved vulvas in a shoebox, uh leggings made from legs, uh a belt made out of nipples, and face masks made from female corpses. Now he did admit during questioning to murdering Bernice Warden and bar owner Mary Hogan, who he killed in 1954, but it turns out the rest of the body parts were actually just stolen corpses from local cemeteries. His ultimate goal in this whole exercise was to make a bodysuit made of human flesh to resemble his mother, so he could once again be inside his dead mother.
SPEAKER_01:Uh mark me down for a no, please.
SPEAKER_00:Ed Gean wasn't actually a serial killer by any real definition, but his his crimes inspired well, there's a controversy about whether or not it inspired Psycho directly, because the novelist who wrote the book actually lived only 35 miles from Ed Gean, but he had nearly completed the book when Geane's murders came to light. He was noted as saying that he was shocked at how closely his character resembled Ed Gean. Which, I mean, come on. I mean, I'm just gonna say it inspired Psycho. We'll leave that for people to decide, but uh it also became the foundation for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs, uh, a movie called Three on a Meat Hook, which is exactly how it sounds, Deranged, and a Corbick McCarthy book, Child of God.
SPEAKER_01:So the true horrors of this world come not only from the waking moments, but also from the unknown terrors in the dark. Such it was for Wes Craven, who was inspired to create the killer nightmare of Freddie Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street by the all-too real and all too deadly experiences. He had heard stories of refugees in the 1970s escaping the genocide of the killing fills. A particular story that caught his attention was that of a young Cambodian man who had come to America with his family. He was plagued by nightmares and PTSD. He was suffering such vivid night terrors that he refused to sleep. He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept the thing in his nightmares chasing him would get him. He was assured that the nightmares were not that unusual and he shouldn't be so terrified. But he didn't buy that, and he started staying up, refusing to sleep. His family and doctors were concerned and began to give him sleeping pills to induce slumber. He had a coffee pot in his room to stay awake, and nobody knew quite what to do. Finally, one day, he was watching TV with his family, and he fell asleep on the couch. They saw him asleep, let out a sigh, brought him up to his room, put him to bed, pleased that he had finally gone into the night. Unfortunately, sleep would take him in all too real away. Soon thereafter, they heard his screams, and they found him thrashing his bed. They ran to call for the ambulance, but by the time they got to him, he had died. He was a youngster having visions of a horror, that of his time in Cambodia. This particular case came from an article in Los Angeles Times, which served as some of the original source material for West Craven. That article noted that 104 men with an average age of 33 had mysteriously died in their sleep. Now, this all comes from an outbreak during the 70s and 80s of a syndrome that affected Southeast Asians. A lot of them were refugees.
SPEAKER_00:Um trying to It's called the CIA.
SPEAKER_01:It'll get ya. Unfortunately, a lot of them they weren't able to worship properly due to the guerrilla war in Laos with the United States. The Hmong people, an ethnic group which mainly lives in southern China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, they believed that if they did not worship properly and perform the proper spiritual rites, the ancestors of the and spirits of the village wouldn't be there to protect them in their sleep, and thus evil spirits would be able to attack them. These attacks induced a nightmare that leads to sleep paralysis, and they would feel a great weight on their chest. Some of these people who were spread out over the United States, they wanted to get a shaman who would come and protect them, but many of them never had access to the shaman.
SPEAKER_03:That's why we need shaman care for all. People shouldn't pay for shamanic care. It should be for everyone.
SPEAKER_01:Hamong people believed that rejecting the role of becoming shamans and helping them into sleep, that they are no.
SPEAKER_00:That line.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, atomic shamans is killer.
SPEAKER_00:Headlighting dispatch Ajax.
SPEAKER_01:In a medical journal, an author suggested that the Huang people didn't die by their own beliefs in the spiritual world, otherwise known as uh nocturnal pressing spirit attacks. There are different ways of saying this all throughout Southern Asia. In Indonesia, it's uh Dijuton, which translates pressed on in English. In China, they have the Baiguya, which translates to being crushed by a ghost. In the Dutch, it's pronounced Nachmeri with nightmare, but also the Merry comes from the Middle Dutch, Mer, an incubus, who lies on people's chests, suffocating them.
SPEAKER_04:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:This phenomenon is also known among people of Laos, who say that malign spirits pronounced dachwa, and they also take the form of a jealous woman and would sit on people. Now, a lot of this is folklore, but unfortunately, there is an actual physical thing that is killing these people. Sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome, or sun. Yeah, it's also considered sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, or sad. Uh what they call them. This syndrome was reported in the Southeast Asian countries. The condition could often be recognized by people falling asleep, making loud groans, and showing signs of difficulty in breathing or labored respiration before becoming rigid and dying. Just out of nowhere. This happens mostly in people of Asian descent, particularly Japanese and Southeast Asian heritage, most acutely of the Hamong peoples. It also occurs 8 to 10 times more often in men than women. One of these versions of this, SADs or sons, is uh called Brugata syndrome. And Brukata syndrome is actually a genetic defect that is found in Hmong and other South Asian people. It is a malfunction of the sodium channels within the heart muscle cells, which leads to abnormal heart rhythms and hearts just stopping. That is a believed version, a cause of some of these suns and sads. But honestly, no one really knows. And it's it seems to have been a thing that continues to happen, you can't get medication for, and that doctors can see you for. But apparently, post-70s and 80s, a lot of people coming from Cambodia, they would have these nightmares that either would help lead to the stuns or be the cause of it. Um, so these true horrors affecting these people, escaping those horrors, but taking their life when they're at their most vulnerable point, which I think is something that West really dug into and used for Freddy Krueger. The idea of just, you know, when you're asleep, you have no defenses, and uh unfortunately it was these real-life deaths that sparked his his brain with that.
SPEAKER_00:So it sounds like that it's a combination of the centuries-old phenomenon of uh sleep paralysis, succubus, incubus, alien abduction, shadow people sometimes, and a genetic disorder, sort of mixing with folklore.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. The research on that it tends to kind of focus more on one or the other, but I think it's a it's a combining of the two where it's the gray in between that's you know, one leading to the other, or it's the grays in between, yeah. Oh god, I hope it's not the grays.
SPEAKER_00:Jake, there's a fire in the sky, did you know?
SPEAKER_01:I don't wanna.
SPEAKER_00:We're coming up on a communion, brother.
SPEAKER_01:I don't want to believe.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but it's funny that like you go from that to um a child molester with razor hands.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, it's it's taking like uh, you know, just one idea. So there's there's an uh an example that I didn't that I looked into that I didn't really get into. So the original writer of Scream came up with the concept. He wrote a 16-page draft because he had seen this serial killer in Florida killing college students, doing some awful things to them, like he would have tortured them, raped them. One woman, he did that, left, thought he forgot his wallet, so he went back to the woman's apartment, decided to cut her head off, put it on a mirror looking at her body. He had read these stories, and then he had gone up to write and he saw that his window was open, and he was like, Oh, what if someone got in? He wrote a short little bit, which is essentially the first bit of the film of Scream that then got turned into a bigger film that was all a discussion on the tropes of horror films. Right, right, but it didn't start like that at all. Yeah, I mean it that all came later, and actually was a lot in the script because a lot of people like they think, oh, this is kind of West Craven's idea. A lot of other people were given that the option to sh to make that movie and they just didn't get it before it's a lot of people still to this day don't get it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's why Scary Movie exists, which was the name of Scream originally.
unknown:Oh no!
SPEAKER_00:It's so meta that they don't even know how meta they are.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, these real life events that just kind of spark one line of thought, and that can go in a completely different direction. Honestly, it's it's probably much better that Wes decided to do this weird child molester with knives her fingers who you know fights people in their dreams, other than the horrors of genocide of uh displaced people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's yeah, if you if you want to watch a good a good uh take on that, watch the terror season two. You know, I haven't seen the terror season. I liked season one. I liked that one a lot. I actually thought it ended better than season one. Okay. It's it takes place in the Japanese internment camps in World War II. Yeah, it's got George Takei in it, which is awesome. It's all about um not an Oni, but a different kind of ghost.
SPEAKER_01:Fascinating. No, I'll have to check that out. Yeah, I like season one. Talk about a show that nobody talks about.
SPEAKER_00:Most likely, an asteroid that crashed billions of years ago. It's finally thawed out and it's attacked a research team in Antarctica.
SPEAKER_01:Finally. You researchers.
SPEAKER_00:So the killer clown thing and fear of clowns in general, uh, has been a trope. Um, but really it it's it's a modern trope, but one that has really old roots that are kind of universal. It just kind of galvanized in recent years. For various reasons. Basically, since forever, the idea of a clown or a fool or a jester, they've been in society since we've had society. They're kind of a way of creating satire in parody and talking about in a humorous way the ills of society or the things that are going on without breaking these social mores that exist. So they get away with stuff. You know, they get away with critique, they get away with parody, they get away with slapstick violence and things that normal humans wouldn't be able to. This comes from an author named Wolfgang Zucker. He points out that a clown's appearance and the cultural depictions of demons and other infernal creatures, like the chalk-white face in which the eyes almost disappear, the mouth enlarged to ghoulish size, uh, it looks like the mask of death. So they've got that visually. And then a professor of psychology, uh Joseph Derwin at California State University of Northridge, pointed out that young children are very reactive to a familiar body type with an unfamiliar face. And so there's some sort of correlation to the uncanny valley that we experience now with AI and robotics. And in addition to that, like I was saying, clown behavior is uh antisocial. We all sort of accept that they can get away with things like uh slapstick violence, or when it was a jester, you know, poking fun at the king, even though that would normally get you killed, he was the one that was supposed to make light of it and he was allowed to do so. In fact, you played a very important role in critique of whatever the modern society was. But that kind of like transgressive behavior can make people feel uncomfortable. It puts you sort of on edge because you know where they're allowed to do that, but if they're allowed to break social mores and you're not, if they ever diverted from that and went down a different path, they'd be capable of anything. And so, like, that's sort of always in people in the back of people's minds. Clowns, fools, and harlequin, they've always been symbols of exaggerated behavior, mischievous scamps who subverted authority for amusement. They get away with parody and criticism, the average person couldn't. And so the trickster behavior is expected. The knowledge that the fool who gets away with this kind of behavior is secretly also completely in control and they know exactly what they're doing, is terrifying because they're not just a random comedic event, they're doing it on purpose and they're subverting social mores on purpose. So if they did something bad, that's why clowns are scary to most people deep down inside. And there are modern events that made people scared of clowns. But I'd like to dispel the idea that John Wayne Gacy is in any way, shape, or form responsible for this because he's not. John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer and a piece of sh. And then also had completely unrelated.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I mean, are you gonna argue that he was no, no, it was just like Hitler was a dick, uh, I don't like him.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, hard truths. I know. But I mean, he never killed anyone as a clown. A menacing clown wasn't his shtick, that wasn't a thing. They found out afterwards that he just happened to be a clown. Those lives were different, completely separate. Like he was a clown at children's parties, no incidents, nothing weird. In his personal life, he was a rapist and a serial killer. Those are different things. You know, they associated that because it was so bizarre. And then, of course, the random clown sightings between basically then and I don't know, a couple years ago. The night clowns, the crypto clowns that you you'd see on the streets all around the world. Which were can I invest in crypto clowns?
SPEAKER_01:Is that the hot new property?
SPEAKER_00:It's not worth much. It just makes a honking sound. It doesn't really, it's not worth any actual money.
SPEAKER_01:I do like the idea of their tokens with just clown faces on them.
SPEAKER_00:Or what they do in clown college. When you graduate from clown college, your face paint pattern is supposed to be unique to you. And so when you graduate, you have to paint your face paint pattern on an egg, and then they put that on a shelf forever, and that's like for your everyone who's ever.
SPEAKER_01:And then they sell it as an NFT?
SPEAKER_00:That's too physical to be an NFT. You can't even that's what NFT's for. Because then it's just rare. Like normal rare.
SPEAKER_01:I'll paint a picture of the egg digitally, and that'll be an NFT.
SPEAKER_00:That's the whole thing behind clowns. But here's a really, really, really interesting story. Ever heard of the Sandown clown?
SPEAKER_01:Uh yes, yes. This uh wise old man told me about it.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know where you're going with that, but I'm curious.
SPEAKER_01:That was you. You told me about it. I hadn't heard about it before, but yeah, you you told me about it. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_00:Please do it. All right. So it was a strange being encountered by two children vacationing in Lake Common Sandown on the Isle of Wight, uh, which if you don't know is in the United Kingdom, in May of 1973. Following a sound that they compared to an ambulance siren, these children wandered across the footbridge over a stream and met a being that has been described by them as a cross between a clown, a robot, and an alien. The Holy Trinity, right? I mean, that's wild. So while crossing the bridge, they first saw a blue gloved hand appear below them, and then a baffling entity emerge. Okay, so this is where you get Stephen King's the thing, this kind of thing, influenced by stories like this. Which is another reason the clowns are in sort of our cultural lexicon. This creature was approximately six and a half foot tall, and he uh retrieved a book that he had dropped into the water in front of the kids. When he retrieved the book, he walked several feet away with a strange hopping motion, I'm guessing like uh Chinese vampires.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And then he entered a small metallic hut that had no windows. The children began to leave when he reappeared about 150 feet away, this time holding a microphone. They heard the sharp siren-like noise again, and then they were terrified. As if it weren't weird enough. When the sound stopped, the creature spoke into the microphone and said, Are you still here? Its friendly tone convinced the kids that it was harmless, and they approached it. It was described as uh being too large for its otherwise thin frame, and its head was shaped like a near perfect sphere. Skin was white, had consistency of paper, its hands and feet possessed only three digits apiece, and its face seemed to have been crudely painted onto the surface of its head. Two blue triangles for eyes and a flat brown rectangle for a nose, and its mouth had thin yellow lips shaped like an oval, which did not move when it spoke. Its hair hung down beneath its hat in a sparse frizzled reddish brown, and two wooden antennae stuck out from the sides of its head, while more wooden slat-like antennae exited from its wrist and ankles. Wow, okay. Um the children described it as resembling resembling a clown costume, with a tall painted hat and a black knob or bobble at the top, and a high-collared suit of red and green. It had blue gloves, but it didn't have shoes. It had trousers and sleeves, but they were long and frilly. So when they went into the hut, because they followed the creature into the hut, it had walls papered with blue green dial patterns and all metallic floors. It contained rough wooden furniture similar to table and chairs. The clown thing told the children that it was frightened of humans and would not defend itself if it were attacked. It claimed that it drank water from the stream after, quote, cleaning it, and gathered wild berries which it ate in an odd manner, they said, by thrusting its head forward and somehow moving the berries back and forth between its eyes and then down to its mouth. Not really sure how to visualize that. It could write in English using a pencil and paper, and when asked what its name was, it responded, Sam, all colours. Uh it's kind of like all dressed chips in Canada. Uh when asked if it was human, it said it was not. When asked if it was a ghost, it said, Well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way. They talked to these kids for about a half an hour, and then they walked home to their parents, told their parents of this story, told everyone they knew of this story, and for the rest of their lives insisted that the story was real. Um even the British um at the time it was uh Bufora, even the British sort of move on. investigated it, cops investigated it, nobody found anything, nobody found anything out of the ordinary, but these girls swear that this happened to this day. And I I do think that this has to be kind of at least even subconsciously somewhere in inspiration for things like it and other scary clown archetypes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's so good. I guess my my main question of all of that is that you're having this conversation with this interdimensional alien clown robot alien thing. At what point do you end the conversation? Uh okay we have nothing left to talk about gotta gotta go get lunch I guess.
SPEAKER_00:Well apparently according to the to the kids he wasn't a very good conversationalist about his origin and like his being in general and he would just say oh you know and shrug and so they kind of got bored with it. Yes you have to tell me you exist now I need to know forget about it. Yeah that's what he did and basically they got bored realized they were never going to learn anything and was like we gotta listen we gotta get out of here to work in the morning. And then they went home and the thing was like okay and then disappeared and no one ever saw it again. Why would kids make that up?
SPEAKER_01:That doesn't sound like a story kids would make up it really doesn't I mean like especially because nothing happens right there's no follow-up and there's no like yeah yeah you they didn't take me to this grand place or or show me the you know tricks of the world or just like oh he's here he he didn't really say anything he was pretty boring he was weird and then we left and he was gone especially yeah considering like how bizarre the thing looked and his basic just existence is complete and so detailed and so weird.
SPEAKER_00:And then they were kind of like they they just left after half an hour because they were bored. That doesn't sound made up to me. I wouldn't you and I wouldn't make up stories like that when we were kids. I mine would be much more fantastical yeah exactly that's I think one of the reasons that it's like stood out for so many people is that it it doesn't make sense that these two girls made it up. Now I one of the theories is uh that phenomenon uh the shared hallucination which it may or may not be a thing but um I mean it's it's easy to sort of like hype each other into things but then in that scenario you would think that the hype would just get higher like you'd get more like it would be more fantastical.
SPEAKER_01:Oh he took me on the ship and you know like well that's what happens with those things it's like oh we saw a fairy and then that fairy like turned our clothes pink and then we got on this giant toadstool and we went into the fairy kingdom. It's not just like oh he just kind of stood there and he he he couldn't hold the conversation and he was kind of boring.
SPEAKER_00:Right after all these interesting things about him he ends up being boring is not a way that a child's story ends that's a weird one that's a weird one but that that's the that was the more because the the killer clown thing is bull uh it's not really a thing. It's just it's a lot of other things.
SPEAKER_01:I thought it'd be funny to look into that one which I did think in influenced some other like Killer Clowns from Outer Space and it there is a thought out there in you know the wild wild conspiracy you know paranormal world that clowns are actually some type of topic being from another universe or dimension. Um that's why we don't really know exactly where they came from or started and that they they prey on our fears.
SPEAKER_00:Uh since this is probably the coolest uh thing you did research on for this whole thing, Jake why don't you play us out it's September 26, 1950.
SPEAKER_01:Philadelphia Pennsylvania police officers Joe Keenan and John Collins are on patrol and they see something something falling from the sky. They travel to the area and search around dangling from a telephone pole there appears to be some kind of mysterious ooze. It was a sparkly mass six feet in diameter one foot thick at the center and an inch or two near the edge of some kind of purple jelly that had a crystal like substance inside of it and was letting off a mist of some sort perhaps it was tricks that were being played on their mind but it appeared to undulate and to move seemingly crawling with its strange nature and possibly of live vibration the cop duo called for backup. Officers James Cooper and Sergeant Joe Cook arrive and witness this disc of gelatinous mystery as well as any right-minded policeman would then do Collins decided to make first contact he reached out his hand and touches it globules stuck to his hand but quickly dissolved into an odorless sticky scum as with the goo retrieved by Collins the rest of the globs seemed to disappear entirely in about 30 minutes after the cops first sighting the following day the Men of Blue addressed the local media claiming what they saw was indeed a living thing possibly from outer space. Following its discovery by the Philadelphia police both the FBI and U.S. Air Force were called in to investigate the quote unquote flying saucer that had crashed and dissolved without a trace the incident made a number of headlines at the time too the story was distributed nationally by the Associated Press, though no explanation was ever presented as to the origin of the substance or whether the officers had misinterpreted the situation. Now we jump to the mid-1950s where Jack Harris, a former vaudevillian and aspiring film distributor is trying to further break into the movie biz. Struggling to find an engaging element for the monster movie he wanted to make he asked his friend and fellow Pennsylvanian Irvine H. Milgate for assistance as they talked that evening the skeleton structure of a meteorite crashing down outside of Philadelphia containing a mystery space jelly evolved. While the connection could never be confirmed by Milgate Harris nor the further screenwriters of Theodore Simpson and Kay Lineker no denial was ever put forth and it is easy to see how these men might have drawn inspiration from the bizarre events a few years earlier. The discovery and description within the film eerily matches the real life account and that's not even mentioning that it was written by FilmDt and starred mostly Pennsylvania locals all of which probably had heard the story as well now as to what that jelly was no one is still sure but that's not the only incident of some type of mysterious goo falling from space that has occurred throughout the centuries. This phenomenon is known as Poudraser Welsh for the rot of the stars it was given this name back in the 1600s and has reoccurred sporadically throughout history it's happened in Tasmania Scotland as well as Texas and other places cut that last bit outy different names such as Starfallen Starfalling Star Jelly Star Shot Star Slime Star Slough Star Slubber Spurt and Star Slutch. It's been called Caca de Luna the Moon's excrement and whether it's extraterrestrial cellular organic matter or some type of melted meteorite or even the uh jelly like glands and from overducts of frogs and toads no one can quite put their finger on what this weird and deviating unknown slime is but it was strange enough to inspire not only these filmmakers but generations henceforth that's all I got I don't know uh blob out and if you guys wouldn't mind reading and reviewing uh perhaps I don't know giving us five stars or whatever um that's actually how we get seen it's not really an ego thing it's just how the algorithms work so we'd really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_04:No matter where you go there you are